We need to abolish software patents, because
there is a vast amount of evidence that software patents
harm software developers and software users (see below).
Nearly everyone uses software, so software patents have been harmful
to everyone.
For example, since any significantly-sized software must use
millions of "inventions", software patents create a
"patent thicket"
where no one can legally develop software.
The purpose of patents is to encourage and share innovation,
but there's no evidence
that patents are needed to encourage software innovation, and they
are useless for sharing innovation.
Indeed, patents actively prevent innovation in software.

As an
Ars Technica article explains,
"The patent system has traditionally excluded coverage of innate
scientific truths and mathematical expressions. There is no basis in
law for assuming that software methods are patentable, but some dubious
legal rulings issued by the Federal Circuit after its inception in the
1980s have created legal precedents for software patentability...
End Software Patents (ESP)'s executive director, tech policy expert
Ben Klemens, [stated that]
'Software patents endanger both software developers and
businesses, ironically stifling the very innovation that the U.S. patent
system was intended to foster.'"

This is a long, hard fight between software innovators and patent lawyers.
Software innovators are interested in innovating, but the
patent system actively prevents this in software.
In contrast, most patent lawyers make money by patenting, and thus are
interested in expanding the use of patents, even when it's bad for
the industry and bad for the country.
Patent lawyers claim that patents encourage innovation, but this has
never been proved; all evidence is that it does not help innovation,
and a lot of evidence points to direct damage.

Articles on why software patents should be abolished

You don't need to take my word for it; many people
have explained some of the many problems that software patents
create, demonstrating that software patents create more problems than
they solve.
Here are a few URLs that explain why software patents are a terrible idea:

Section I provides a legal perspective.
He also explains what computer scientists understand but most
lawyers don't: "once one type of information processing is
patentable, all types are patentable. Because there are various types of
information processing that many think should not be patentable, the
patentability of any one type of pure information processing
creates myriad problems."

Section II provides an economic perspective; and shows why
"allowing software and business methods to be patentable creates
transaction costs that easily dwarf the benefits that such patent protection
may provide. The key concept behind the discussion is that these
pseudo-industries are massively decentralized, and patents do
not efficiently promote progress in a decentralized industry...
the waste and economic loss associated... becomes inevitable."

He makes it clear that
"Fixing the obviousness problem would do nothing, however,
to alleviate the problems..."; instead,
"many of the problems with patents...
can be solved by reinstating the distinction from Diehr
and its predecessors that indicate a device is patentable only if it is
based on steps that are simultaneously novel and non-trivially physical...".

"The Software Patent Experiment" (James Bessen and Robert M. Hunt) -
James Bessen (Research on Innovation and Boston University) and
Robert M. Hunt (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia) provide a
sobering less-technical summary of important research they did on software
patents. They found that in the 1990s, the firms that were increasingly
patenting software were the ones that were decreasing their research and
development -- that is, patents are replacing research and development,
not encouraging it.

Ed Burnette's essay
on software patents notes that software patents are one of the worst
things to happen to the software industry;
the "only solution is to ban software patents
altogether, worldwide. Copyright law provides plenty of protection
for software, just as it does for paintings, poetry, and books."

Patent system needs overhaul, say researchers -
"Markets are much better than patents in stimulating intellectual curiosity and discovery, according to Swiss-led research.
An international team, led by Professor Peter Bossaerts from Lausanne's Federal Institute of Technology, carried out experiments to quantify the ways patent systems and market forces might influence someone to invent and solve intellectual problems.
Their findings were published in the latest issue of the journal Science."

Patent-Litigation Weekly: The Photo-Sharing Files
gives some of the heart-breaking tales of small entrepreneurs being
extorted by holders of patents that should never have been granted.
Here we have a patent on sharing pictures on the web — an obvious
application if there ever was one, since the whole point of the
web is to exchange and share information.

"Ignoring Patents" by Mark A. Lemley (July 3, 2007)
explains that
"both researchers and companies [in IT] simply ignore patents. Virtually
everyone does it. They do it at all stages of endeavor. From the
perspective of an outsider to the patent system, this is a remarkable
fact. And yet it may be what prevents the patent system from crushing
innovation in component industries like IT. Ignoring patents, then,
may be a 'workaround' that allows the innovation system to function in
the face of overbroad patent protection."
He tries to develop a workaround, but instead of creating a workaround,
we should actually fix the problem by eliminating software patents.

"Letter to an Anonymous Patent Attorney" by N. Stephan Kinsella
is a letter by a registered patent attorney who argues that patents
should be abandoned entirely. He argues that many attorneys mindlessly
accept that the current system is good and have a good reason to not
think about it closely, since it pays their mortgages.
(Upton Sinclair noted this problem long ago:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!").
This is an important issue to understand - asking patent lawyers if
software patents are a good idea is a lot like asking foxes if henhouses should
continue to have unlocked doors.
He often contributes to
Against Monopoly.

This
Groklaw article suggests Microsoft was trying to peddle patents
to patent trolls specifically to stifle competition, and the article
"Microsoft and Patent Trolls" from Red Hat.
says that Microsoft even used marketing materials that
"highlighted offensive uses of the patents against open source software,
including a number of the most popular open source packages".
OIN
bought them instead, but the whole purpose of OIN is silly: To
enable innovation in spite of the how the law is currently interpreted.
OIN is important, given today's bad law; it tries to enable some innovation
in spite of the stifling effect of software patent monopolies.
But we need to fix the current interpretations of the law, rendering
them unnecessary.

Donald Knuth is one of the world's leading experts on algorithms and
software development
(he's a recipient of the Turing Award, creator of the TeX
computer typesetting system,
and author of The Art of Computer Programming aka the
"Bible of computer programming").
He's a long-time opponent of patenting software; here are
Knuth's 2009 and 1994 letters opposing the patenting of software.
Knuth even has a few patents on hardware devices,
but strongly believes that
"the recent trend to patenting algorithms is of benefit only to a very
small number of attorneys and inventors, while it is seriously harmful to
the vast majority of people who want to do useful things with computers".

A lot of lawyers seem to think software is patentable because they think
there is something fundamentally different about math and software.
The funny thing is that there a mathematical proof that math
and software are the same thing.
When politicians and lawyers try to legislate something against facts,
such trying to make pi a rational number or
trying to make software different than math, the result is bad law.
The
Curry–Howard correspondence
proves that there is a deep correspondance between math and programs.

The movie Patent Absurdity
explores the case of software patents and the history of judicial activism that led to their rise, and the harm being done to software developers and the wider economy as a result.

"An Overview of the 'Patent Trolls' Debate" by Brian T. Yeh,
August 20, 2012 (Congressional Research Service)
works hard to be even-handed, but it's hard ignore the
incredible damage done by patent trolls to IT developers and users,
and I think its effort to examine all sides shows that patent trolls
are a serious problem.
It notes that
"Patent litigation is very expensive; the average suit
in which $1 million to $25 million is at stake costs $1.6 million
through discovery and $2.8 million through trial."
It also finds that "the notice function has broken down
in the IT sector. There are two aspects to notice failure:
(1) claims have 'fuzzy boundaries' that cannot be reliably determined,
much less known in advance, without litigation;
(2) it is economically infeasible or irrational for
defendants to search through existing patents to avoid infringement."
Indeed, "Several provisions of section 112
are supposed to filter out abstract or ambiguous patents and ensure the
world is on notice as to what each patent covers.
The FTC and many observers indicate that these
requirements have been less stringently applied
and enforced in the IT industry than other sectors
where notice failure is less of a problem."

In a
speech on March 17, 2008, Ms Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi
(Minister for Public Service and Administration, South Africa) said,
"Whereas open standards and free software are intended to be inclusive and
encourage fair competition, patents are exclusive and anti-competitive
in their nature. Whereas there are some industries in which the
temporary monopoly granted by a patent may be justified on the grounds
of encouraging innovation, there is no reason to believe that society
benefits from such monopolies being granted for computer programme
'inventions'.... such protection is not required to drive innovation
in software... African software developers have enough barriers to
entry as it is, without the introduction of artificial restrictions on
what programs they are and aren't allowed to write... It will become
increasingly important for FOSSFA to continue to lobby and mobilise
to keep this intellectual space open. One cannot be in Dakar without
being painfully aware of the tragic history of the slave trade. For
three hundred years, the Maison des Esclaves (Slave House) on Goree
Island, was a hub in the system of forceful transportation of Africans as
slaves... That a crime against humanity of such monstrous proportions was
justified by the need to uphold the property rights of slave owners and
traders should certainly make us more than a little cautious about what
should and should not be considered suitable for protection as property."

Patent trolls considered useful
argues that patent trolls are useful in getting rid of software patents.
"Patent trolls are just what the doctor ordered for this sick society of
ours. They're the chemo to the patent cancer. The medicine is certainly
nasty enough, but if it kills the disease before the patient, it's
all good in the long run, right? ... Since they don't do anything
useful themselves, they can't be countersued for patent infringement,
nor can a MAD cross-licensing deal be negotiated as is usual between
industry heavyweights. Thus I hope that patent trolls become even more
plentiful than they already are, so much so that they can severely damage
the ability of large corporations to do business. Given the premise, the
latter might just have to cry 'uncle' and reverse their patent lobbying
stances, otherwise facing the fate of the dinosaurs."

Even many who think that software patents are okay in principle
admit that the current system is a failure, noting that the USPTO
simply cannot properly review software patents.
Tony Bradley's "HTC and Apple Put Patent Burden on ITC" (PC World)
notes that in today's technology companies,
"Patent suits are part of a systemic business strategy to stifle competition.
... many patents seem trivial or inappropriate,
and the lines between technologies patented by one company and technologies
patented by another are very fine — if they exist at all.
At the root of the problem is the fact that the
US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) lacks the resources —
both in personnel and intellectual capacity — to comprehensively
review the sheer volume of patents filed each year. The patent office
relies on the filing party to have done sufficient due diligence regarding
prior art and existing patents, and essentially rubber stamps patents and
places the burden on the US legal system to sort it out after the fact.
Ultimately, it seems like a misappropriation of an overburdened legal
system for tech companies to utilize it as a forum for operational
business strategy, or for the USPTO to exploit it to delegate its
responsibility for patent oversight."
This view is held by many, but I think grossly misplaced.
The USPTO has worked hard to ramp up, and still simply cannot perform
proper review, because we've changed the rules — historically it
was well-understood that mathematics
historically cannot be patented, and that software algorithms
are mathematics; once the lower courts rewrote law,
the USPTO has never found a way to do the job it's asked to do.

In a related note,
Johanna Blakely's "Lessons from fashion's free culture" (TEDxUSC 2010)
shows that fashion clothing is relatively free of copyright and patents,
and in fact, there is a "culture of copying".
She shows it is a false myth that
"without ownership there is no incentive to innovate", because here
is a whole industry where there is no effective
ownership of ideas, and yet there is continuous creativity.
Courts have ruled that apparel design is "too utilitarian" to qualify
for copyright protection (as with hairdos, tattoo artists, jokes, food,
rules of games, smells of perfumes).
In particular, she showed that gross sales of "low IP" industries
are far greater than the "high IP" industries.

In an embarrassing turn of events (for the pro-patent lobby),
"Patenting by Entrepreneurs: The Berkeley Patent Survey (Part III of III)"
found that in software companies, executives reported overall that
patents provide less than "slight" incentive to invent, perform initial
R & D, and commercialize products;
they even admitted that generally accorded
"with anecdotal reports from the software industry".
Rather than simply admitting that the executives of these companies
actually understood their business, they came up
with various alternative hypothesis.
To me, their alternative interpretations look like
an attempt to avoid the obvious: Software patents do not encourage
software innovation.

Patents and copyright
takes another tack at explaining the nonsense of software patents,
particularly the patents that claim that, although X isn't patentable,
"X using a computer" is patentable (!).

"Microsoft’s Android Shakedown" (Timothy Lee, Forbes, July 7, 2011)
isn't about getting rid of software patents, but it shows their problems.
In particular, it notes that the current system causes a
"transfer of wealth from young, growing, innovative companies like Google to mature, bureaucratic companies like Microsoft and IBM—precisely the opposite of the effect the patent system is supposed to have".

"When Patents Attack!" (PBS radio)
by NPR reporter Laura Sydell and
This American Life producer/Planet Money co-host Alex Blumberg explores
patents and patent trolls in general.
"We take you inside this war, and tell the fascinating story of how an
idea enshrined in the US constitution to promote progress and innovation,
is now being used to do the opposite".
It particularly focuses on the role of patent troll Intellectual Ventures
created by Nathan Mrhyvold.

Many consider software patents, particularly when a patent troll sues,
a modern form of
danegeld
(a tribute paid to the Viking raiders to save a land from being ravaged).
Although many company leaders suggest paying off the trolls, the problem
is that they keep coming back; as pointed out in
Rudyard Kipling's "Dane-Geld",
"if once you have paid him the Dane-geld / You never get rid of the Dane".

The JMRI-Katzer legal dispute involved a patent dispute.
Bob Jacobsen's story
(per FLOSS Weekly) powerfully illustrates the problems of software patents.
The JMRI project is a simple model railroading project, built by multiple
people as a hobby, but it became extremely important because
this court case led to
US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit 2008-1001 Jacobsen vs. Katzer, which
ruled emphatically that FLOSS licenses is legally enforceable
("the terms of the Artistic License are enforceable copyright conditions").
To oversimplify, Katzer watched an OSS project, filed software patents
that described what they had created (using continuations to backdate them),
and then sued the actual creators.
This nonsense was perfectly legal!

"Oracle v. Google Shows the Folly of U.S. Software Patent Law"
by Julie Samuels (Wired, April 23, 2012)
notes that
"software often does not require the type of heavy investment that should result in a 20-year monopoly...
Software patents are also notoriously vague and difficult to understand, making it impossible for small inventors to navigate the system without expensive legal help...
software patents are nearly five times more likely to be the subject of litigation as other patents [and] have become part of the price of doing business in America...
The patent system is supposed to benefit society and those who create, but instead the real winners in this game are the lawyers...
In the fast-changing world of technology...
it’s important that this ability to use and share is protected...
rights holders [are] attempting to cut off important and popular downstream
uses of their products, even when those uses may be legal (such as a fair use)
or beneficial to society at large."
The article concludes,
"it’s time to rethink our policies on software patents...
Patent litigation has become little more than a tax on innovation
that drives companies from the U.S. market and discourages investment..."

Sites/Organizations dedicated to abolishing software patents

Most software developers are opposed to software patents, since
software patents endanger their livelihood.
So unsurprisingly, there are whole sites and organizations
dedicated to ending software patents.
Some of these sites/organizations are:

Stopgap measures

The only real solution for software patents is to eliminate them.
All stopgap measures are only that - they reduce some of the
harms that software patents create, without actually solving the problem.

Still, if a hurricane is coming in, it's usually better to lose one major
city instead of three.
Reducing the huge volume of bad patents that are absurd or prior art,
and countering patent trolls who extort actual innovators without producing
anything of value themselves, could help.
They are completely inadequate to the task, so please don't think that
these tweaks will be enough to make software patents acceptable.

There are some stopgap measures that exist today, and some stopgaps
that could be adopted by countries unable to completely repair the laws
or court precedences.

Stopgap measures: Existing Organizations

There are several organizations that try to reduce the damage of
software patents, typically via software patent pools or by
overturning a patent.

Software patent pools
reduce the harm caused by software patents by buying and pooling
patents so that everyone can use them, as long as they meet certain
conditions (such as not suing the other pool users).
As long as our silly system exists, I'm glad they exist too.
Of course, their very existence indicts software patents - why must
organizations be set up to counter government-created monopolies?
Why not just eliminate the monopolies in the first place?

Of course, patent pools cannot end the problem of patent trolls
(aka "non-practicing entities").
Patent trolls make nothing of value, and solely exist to sue (or
threaten to sue) the innovators who create and make actual products.
This is one of the reasons patent trolls are particularly
dangerous to innovation.

Another approach is to try to invalidate a patent.
PubPat is an organization known for this.
But this is expensive and time-consuming to do for each patent.
It'd be better to eliminate entire classes of patents that cause
problems for society; I believe all software patents and
all business method patents are part of those classes.

Stopgap measures: Existing law/rules

As noted in
Prosecution Laches May Bar Enforcement of Patent
(May 20, 2002), the Federal Circuit ruled in
"Symbol Technologies Inc. v. Lemelson Medical, Education &
Research Foundation Limited Partnership"
that the equitable doctrine of laches may permanently bar enforcement
of patents that issued after a long delay in prosecuting the patents
even though the applicant complied with all pertinent statutes and rules.
"Laches is an equitable defense that arises from a delay in taking action. Laches defenses have been successful in cases in which a patent owner knows about an infringement and then delays many years before bringing suit. Laches typically bars the recovery of any past damages but allows for the recovery of damages arising after the filing of the lawsuit. A related doctrine is equitable estoppel, which arises from misleading conduct by the patent owner that leads the defendant reasonably to infer that the patent owner does not intend to enforce its patent against the defendant. A finding of equitable estoppel may preclude any recovery."

In theory, patents aren't supposed to be granted if they
existed previously, or aren't novel.
At the very least, existing practice + using the Internet should not be
patentable; the idea of using the Internet is obvious.
But this is theory; in practice, the USPTO routinely
stifles innovation by granting patents on the previously-known and obvious.

The "written description" requirement,
can (sometimes) invalidate some of the worst software patents.
That's because many software patents simply describe abstract goals, instead of
specific and novel methods for achieving them.
Howard Levine discusses this
(see video and
text).

Signals, including gestures, are not supposed to patented.
U.S. law (Section 101 of Title 35 U.S.C.) defines what is patentable subject matter: "Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title." Gestures are not processes, machines, manufactures, or compositions of matter, so they are NEVER supposed to be patented.
Gestures are basically signals, and signals are specifically NOT patentable. The Federal Circuit has ruled that signals are not statutory subject matter, because articles of manufacture (the only plausible category) do not include intangible, incorporeal, transitory entities (in In re Nuitjen, 500 F.3d 1346 (Fed. Cir. 2007)).

Amusingly, lawyers are starting to receive a taste of their
own bad medicine.
Absurd rulings such as State Street have
opened patentability to nearly everything... including legal methods.
Suddenly lawyers are finding that they can't give advice without
checking on whether or not legal ideas are patented, and now that
they're receiving a taste of their own medicine, they are finding it
unpleasant.
The article
"The patent office meets the poison pill: Why legal methods cannot be patented" by Andrew A. Schwartz* (Harvard Journal of Law & Technology,
Volume 20, Number 2 Spring 2007)
gives an argument as to why legal methods should not be patented.
In particular, it claims that "invention" should (still) be considered as
"anything made by man that utilizes or harnesses a law of nature for human
benefit", and that thus legal methods shouldn't be
considered inventions.
That paper tries to claim that it's a narrow notion that would allow
many business patents, but it seems to me that the
same arguments apply to business methods and software patents.
I think most people would agree that mathematics and financial transactions
are not "laws of nature" - and that would exclude many software patents.

"Patent Troll Lawyers Smacked Down, Made To Pay Sanctions, For Mass Lawsuits Followed By Quick Settlement Offers"
reports an interesting ruling by the CAFC in
"CAFC in EON-NET LP v. FLAGSTAR BANCORP".
In this case, a patent troll was threatening lawsuits, but was willing to
settle for much smaller fees than a court case.
The district court found that Eon-Net's case against Flagstar had "indicia
of extortion" because it was part of Eon-Net's history of "filing nearly
identical patent infringement complaints against a plethora of diverse
defendants, where Eon-Net followed each filing with a demand for a quick
settlement at a price far lower than the cost to defend the litigation".
The court notes that "it's no surprise that most companies agree
to settle. This is important, because we regularly hear from patent
system supporters insisting that when companies settle, it's proof that
the patents are valid. Yet, here, the court itself points out that's
ridiculous: In this case, Flagstar expended over $600,000 in attorney fees
and costs to litigate this case through claim construction...
Viewed against Eon-Net's $25,000 to
$75,000 settlement offer range, it becomes apparent why the vast majority
of those that Eon-Net accused of infringement chose to settle early in the
litigation... those low settlement
offers - less than ten percent of the cost that Flagstar expended to
defend suit - effectively ensured that Eon-Net's baseless infringement
allegations remained unexposed, allowing Eon-Net to continue to collect
additional nuisance value settlements [and]
As a non-practicing entity, Eon-Net was generally immune to
counterclaims for patent infringement, antitrust, or unfair competition
because it did not engage in business activities that would potentially
give rise to those claims."
In the end, the court agreed and allowed the district court's award
for Rule 11 violations and attorneys' fees.

These can limit specific forms of abuse, but they don't really
solve the problem.

Stopgap measures: Potential legislation/standards bodies rules

Here are some possible future
approaches that might reduce the damage of software
patents, until software patents are eliminated:

Have fines proportional to the importance of the patent to the product,
and do NOT normally "stop work" if a patent is infringed.
At the least, "stop work" should not be an option if the suing party is
not actively selling products/services using the patent.
(Remember, software is typically built from millions of "inventions".)

Eliminate triple damages unless the patent user was told that the
specific patent specifically applied to that product. Software patents
are essentially unreadable (most wouldn't be granted if they were clear)
and there are too many to read, so it's absurd to hold developers to an
impossible requirement. Let them innovate instead of reading nonsense
patents.

Eliminate the presumption in court that a granted patent is valid,
at least for software and business processes. For any patent case,
a court would need to determine if a granted patent is valid.
The PTO's review process is absurdly poor, and the rules have changed
significantly in the last few years, so this presumption is completely invalid.

Courts should be required to wait for the results of any
ongoing patent review before rendering a verdict. (See the Blackberry suit!)

Require mandatory public review, before granting a patent.

Require that IT interoperability standards be implementable patent-free.
In particular, get ISO and others to move in that direction, and get
standards-imposing bodies (like governments) on board.
See Digistan for more.

Non-practicing entities shouldn't have the right to enforce patents
at all! Allowing non-practicing entities to enforce patents puts a big
brake on innovation, because it can easily lead to cases where no one
can build useful products.

Software developers can try to write around patents, i.e., by
implementing algorithms that avoid patent claims.
Andrew Tridgell on Patent Defence
discusses how to do this.
This may be possible for a specific few patents if you know of key ones,
and in some cases it is the wise thing to do for now,
but in the grand scheme this is completely impossible.
There are a vast number of software patents,
there is no realistic way to search them,
and many software patents are nearly impossible to decipher
even if you found them (they are written for lawyers, not for practitioners,
and are often very vague).
Many patents describe prior art, or are obvious,
or simply describe a problem to be solved instead of how to solve it.
In any case, doing this distracts developers from actually solving problems.
In short, this may sometimes be necessary for individual developers,
but this is a big drain on innovation, and it is completely
impractical to do in general.

Reverse Bifurcation is a proposed procedural change.
One strategy for dealing with patent trolls and software patents generally
is "to decide cheaper and easier issues early in the litigation process".
Dennis Crouch and Robert P. Merges' article "Operating Efficiently Post-Bilski by Ordering Patent Doctrine Decision-Making" 25 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 1673 (2010) examines some of these. An example of the strategy is "reverse bifurcation", in which the "damages phase is moved to the front of the litigation sequence with the goal of figuring out how much is really at stake. This procedural move may be particularly appropriate in the case of patent holders who sue a large number of parties, including parties with relatively small potential damages pools, in the hopes of extracting the aforementioned undeserved rents".

A few absurd patents

Patent #6,004,596 on making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the crust.

Patent #6,368,227 showing a method of swinging on a swing sideways.

Patent #5,443,036 explaining a method for "exercising a cat" by pointing a laser pointer and "selectively redirecting said beam out of the cat's immediate reach to induce said cat to run and chase said beam and pattern of light around an exercise area."

Patent # 8,011,991 on building a snowman.

Anti-patent?

I think that allowing patents for software and business methods was
a mistake; patents were historically not allowed to cover
general algorithms and business methods for a reason.

I'm willing to believe that patents are quite appropriate for
mechanical devices or new pharmaceuticals; I'm no expert in them,
and there seems to be some weak evidence that they have advantages in
pharmaceuticals.
But for software and business methods,
patents have been a complete and utter disaster.
Let's end the mistake.